Author and activist Arundhati Roy
Credit: PTI File Photo
New Delhi: Safety suffocates me. An unusual comment from others perhaps but not when it comes from Arundhati Roy who has faced fame and fury alike for her writings, be it her debut novel that won her the Booker Prize in 1997 and propelled her to stardom or her unflinching political pieces.
Roy, whose candid memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me was launched on Thursday, takes it all in her stride. Even if she is called an antinational whose words and views have made her the target of trolls and a polarising figure.
As she sees it, her writings, scathing for some and straightforward for others, come from “a place of love and caring about something”.
“I write when it becomes harder to keep quiet than to write,” Roy told PTI in an interview.
It has been so right from her first political essay "The End of Imagination", which confronted nuclear proliferation and its devastating impact on humanity and the environment.
"People don't understand why one gets so upset? Why do I write? Because it comes from a place of love. It comes from caring about something. Otherwise, why should I bother? Like, why shouldn't I enjoy my Booker Prize or whatever it was,” she said about her much feted debut novel “The God of Small Things”.
"Almost all the people who we call 'antinationals' are the ones who care. And then the people who call themselves great nationalists, I can bet you that 99 per cent of them are dodging taxes, have sent their kids to America, or are doing everything to make sure that what goes on in this country doesn't affect their personal wealth or their whatever bullshit," the ever frank Roy added.
She is a writer and an activist but hyphenate the two and she says it’s a label she finds absurd, something like the clunky term "sofa-bed".
Her latest explores how Roy navigated the ebbs and flows of life to become person she is today -- the one who continues to find solace in the most dangerous of places rather than the safe ones.
"The most dangerous place since the history of time has been writing. I've never been under any illusion that it was a safe place. So I'm okay here. Because it's the safety that suffocates me," she declared.
Over the past two decades, Roy has authored non-fiction books -- including "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" -- and numerous essays covering a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from Kashmir, big dams, and globalisation to Dalit icon B R Ambedkar, meetings with Maoist rebels, and conversations with whistleblower Edward Snowden and Hollywood actor John Cusack.
The subtext of straight talk continues in her latest work centred around the fraught relationship with her mother Mary Roy, a celebrated educator and women’s rights activist who fought the landmark case allowing Kerala’s Syrian Christian women equal rights in their father's property.
Roy said the book was born out of the "onrush of memories and feelings provoked by Mary's death" in 2022 at the age of 89.
"I wrote this book because I feel that my mother is someone who deserves to be shared with the world." "Mother Mary Comes to Me" offers a deep dive into her tumultuous life, with Roy mincing no words as she gives voice to long-held emotions and recounts her equation with her tough, strong-headed mother.
She describes the book as neither a judgment nor an accusation, and certainly not a "hagiography". For a writer, she adds, the most interesting thing is to “write without resolving".
"I never responded to her... I was quiet all this time, but here's here it is, you know... I try not to judge her. I don't know whether that's right or wrong, but I tried and I succeeded, I think," the 63-year-old explained.
"I just think as a writer, she is an unusual character in her own way. It was difficult. But what's the point to write something that's not difficult is no point. There's no point in writing anything that's not difficult to write." Revered by her fans and almost unfailing reviled by her critics, the 2024 Pen Pinter Prize awardee's work has often provoked extreme reactions -- from burning her effigies and disrupting her events to being told to go to Pakistan and facing charges of sedition and contempt, this celeb author-activist has seen it all.
In fact, her meteoric rise to fame with “The God of Small Things" was not without controversy. She was accused of obscenity, marking the first of three criminal cases filed against her. One of those cases led her to spend a day in jail for protesting the construction of big dams during the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
This August, her book "Azadi" was among the 25 books banned by the administration in Jammu and Kashmir for promoting a "false narrative and secessionism" in the region.
The 1961 Meghalaya-born writer and trained architect left her home in Kerala at 18 and lived hand to mouth while dabbling in various professions, including a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, acting in "Massey Sahib" and both acting and screenwriting in the National Award-winning "In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones".
She has a self confessed spine of steel, thanks to her mother, the complete antithesis of typical doting maternal figure.
Roy recalls in her book that her mother insisted that she and her brother Lalith Kumar Christopher address her as “Mrs Roy” like her students at Pallikoodam, the school she founded in Kerala's Kottayam.
"It was almost as though for her (Mary) to shine her light on her students and give them all she had, we -- he (the brother) and I (Roy) -- had to absorb the darkness," writes Roy.
"She was rough, and that roughness was what put some steel into my spine... So when all those people were around me -- protesting and calling me names -- I’d just be going like, 'Do you know whose daughter I am?' Like, my needle isn't moving at all," Roy laughed, adding that the life she has lived makes her feel "165 years old" mentally while a part of her remains "highly immature".
It’s difficult to tell which is the Roy who says with characteristic bluntness that she feels no national pride.
"I feel love but not pride at all. Love from what is familiar, what you know, and all of that. But you've got to tell me, like, why should I be proud when you practice caste, when you think of people as subhuman, when you have no desire to create a more equal society, what is there to feel proud of in those things?" The book also narrates Roy's relationship with her estranged father - she met him for the first time when she was 25 - her loving brother, her romantic partners, and her ex-husband, renowned naturalist Pradeep Krishen. It also follows her engagement with social issues and subsequent controversies, including her brushes with the law.
Priced at Rs 899, Mother Mary Comes To Me, published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI), is available for purchase across online and offline stores.